Eros And The Book Of Mormon

We are what we love. Eros finds us out whether we wish it or not.

But we are also known by that which we do not love. As much as I tried, and prayed, I could not love The Book Of Mormon.

One of the most impassioned testimonies of love for The Book Of Mormon comes from Jeffery Holland. He claims that for me to leave LDSinc., "it must be done by crawling over or under or around the Book of Mormon." Not so. Despite all my efforts, that book failed to strike me in any of the ways he claims it strikes him.

I tried, God knows I tried. I was embarrassed and felt inadequate that I could not make that book into that which Holland claims it to be. It has nothing to do with some stubborn repugnance for "scripture". I in fact enjoyed many elements of the D&C. And later, while trying to hang on as a faithful Mormon, while digging deeper for *some* profundity, anything, I was quite intrigued by the King Follett Discourse. And I absolutely loved many aspects of the King James Bible, a love that abides to this day. But The Book Of Mormon I could not love or pretend to love. When giving talks I avoided quoting from it. I "studied" the required 15 minutes a day, but no love would come.



Consider this on Eros and reading:

"It is a question about the relations between readers and their reading. We have already recalled the famous words of Francesca in Dante’s Inferno. Other, similar scenarios come to mind, for example, that of Pushkin’s heroine in Eugene Onegin:

Tatiana is besotted by romantic fiction:

with what attention she now

reads a delicious novel,

with what vivid enchantment

drinks the seductive fiction!

… sighs, and having made her own

another’s ecstasy, another’s melancholy,

she whispers in a trance, by heart,

a letter to the amiable hero.

(3:9)

"Readers in real life, as well as within fiction, bear witness to the allure of the written text. The novelist Eudora Welty says of her mother: “She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him” (1984, 17). Dickens himself would not have been discomfited by such a spirit in a reader, if we may judge from a letter he wrote to Maria Beadnell in 1855. Here he speaks of his novel David Copperfield to the woman who inspired Dora: “Perhaps you have once or twice laid down that book and thought ‘How dearly that boy must have loved me and how vividly this man remembers it!’ ” (Slater 1983, 66). Through Francesca, through Tatiana, through Maria Beadnell, through Eudora Welty’s mother, some current of eros leapt from a written page. You have felt it yourself, reading Montaigne or Heliodoros or Sappho. Can we arrive at a more realistic appraisal of this phenomenon? Just what is erotic about reading and writing?"

--Anne Carson--
--Eros The Bittersweet: An Essay--


I cannot understand a mind like Holland's. I cannot understand how it is he can love The Book Of Mormon or even claim such love. Indeed, as a man trained in literature, I'm surprised he isn't embarrassed by his religion's principle religious text. Not because of its contested authorship or historicity. Most of us did not find it difficult to crawl over, under or around these facts once we got going. But because of its shear, shall I say, unlovableness? What kind of person falls in love with The Book Of Mormon?

Rather than believing Holland possessing such bizarre bad taste, it is easier for me to believe he is lying. A professional lie of course, for that is his job. Many of us must lie in the course of our work. But a lie it is nonetheless. This is easier for me to grasp than to believe Eros lies lurking somewhere in reading of Heleman and his warriors, say.

Then again, the truth isn't always in what's easiest. Maybe Holland loves The Book Of Mormon after all.

Human, lover of many books, just not that one

I'm with you. I love a beautifully written book; such a book is delicious to me.

As a believer, I tried to find things to love in the Book of Mormon. I found a few things to lie about. Now that I don't believe, I find the Book of Mormon to be full of hate and terribly boring.

liesarenotuseful Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I find the Book
> of Mormon to be full of hate and terribly boring.


I can forgive the hatred, but not the boredom.

A great book can be chock-full of hatred, Celiné's "Journey Into the End Of Night" for example. But boredom is a literary sin. (Although I hear Karl Ove Knausgård is getting away with it very well indeed.)

Cheers

This post made me think of my name sake, in "Time Enough at Last." I wonder what would have happened if post-cataclysm instead of the ecstasy of finding a library full of books, all Henry could find was a Book of Mormon. Can you imagine! No doubt he would have found that situation more insufferable than the devastation around him, and more prone to use that gun. In that episode, the loss of his glasses might have been portrayed as ecstatic relief.

Its funny how as a Mormon "the love of ____" (this and that) is constantly being forced upon you. Think about the time spent wondering, "What is wrong with me, why do I hate ________." When did you finally realize that the problem was the BofM itself and not your failure of spirit?

HB

Even as an ex-mormon I tried to pretend that the BofM had some hidden value that I was somehow over-looking.

When young, Mormonism seemed more legitimate precisely because it has it's very own book. I was uncomfortable that I couldn't see/feel its value. And as an ex-mormon, in the tumultuous beginning years, I hung onto the idea that there was something in it because so many professed to see it! Admitting that I was right, that the book is complete shite on every level that could be looked at, meant also admitting that the mormons around me were either lying or...something else. Classic cognitive dissonance.

As I read more my literacy grew stronger, and my understanding of the inner-tickings of myself and other people, including the mormons around me, grew more nuanced. It's not a question of them lying or not lying (despite how my OP vis-a-vis Holland is worded).


The theme of my recovery has been one long learning curve towards trusting my own experience and noticing the small but very significant "hair-splitting" (haha) differences that really do make a difference. The INTJ thread reminded me of how I hate the falseness of binary questions and answers. Computers may work on such a framework but we humans certainly do not.

Eventually it didn't matter if my failure to see the BofM as Holland professes to see it was my own lack of power or the book's lack of power. I learned to trust Eros and truly love the things I actually love, which leaves little room for all that Eros does not bring to me.


By the way, this post was prompted by reflections upon an uber-mormon niece, now an adult with several children and living in a small mormon town married to an institute teacher. She was exceedingly bright and brave. She could have taken up and succeeded at anything. She chose to study music in University and excelled at it. Yet, no exaggeration, she will not play in her home anything but Primary songs for the kids and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir for herself. And she professes that the greatest music in the world is encapsulated in the Mormon Hymn-book.

Is she lying?

Human

(1) It's important to remember that Jeffrey Holland doesn't matter.

(2) Religions of many stripes pay lip service to "love" but I see the religion/love axis as a zero-sum construct: the more energy we invest in religion, the less we have left to invest in love. Fortunately, love obviates the need for religion. For some folks bereft of love, religion exists as a back-up plan, I suppose.

At first I thought the title was Errors And The Book of Mormon. The subject was even better than I expected. Great post, Human.

I have never loved a book...liked a few but not actually loved any...and I've not read that one.

RB

Each time that I am unfortunate enough to hear Holland talking about the BoM (or, well, anything, really) I am impressed by his insistence on the lofty wonder of that greatest of all books. I wonder if he could really believe what he is saying. The only ways that I can imagine that anyone could believe it would be if:

1) He was raised on nothing but the BoM from earliest childhood. Perhaps having it read to him every night, as a special treat, by someone whom he loved dearly.

2) He had never read or heard any of the standard body of great literature.

Or

3) His mentors would have had to taint all mention of every other piece of literature by scornful criticism and indignant comparisons which emphasized that each non-BoM work was foul in some way, in comparison to the BoM.

Otherwise, I just can't get how anyone could read the BoM and see it as anything other than a sad, second-rate copy of much better things.

I tried so hard to get into the BoM. To see something life-changing in it. To see anything at all that would make it seem to be wonderful.

I just could not do it. It hit me immediately that it was very poorly done. That it was filled with things that simply could not be correct. That most of it was simply stolen from someone else. It was actually a painful experience for me --- at the time I so wanted to be able to join my loved ones in their adventure. (And that was all before Prop 8 completely blew any chance of sympathy for TSCC.)

Now, of course, I see it as a fortunate thing that I had already been exposed to truly great literature. That I had already learned enough about the preColumbian world to know nonsense when I saw it. And that I had been taught to think in such a way that all of the posing and conniving in the world couldn't make the BoM appear to be either inspired or inspiring.

This is a beautiful post, Human! Even in all my zaniness as a TBM, I never loved the BoM either. There was always something not quite right about it from its use of stilted language to its lack of gospel. Moroni's Boner.

I once had the experience of watching KBYU on a Sunday
morning. There was a round-table discussion of some "scholars"
(BYU religion professors) who were discussing the Book of
Mormon. What struck me was how they would take a few words and
then find a profound "hidden meaning" in them. A meaning that
I didn't see there at all even AFTER they had pointed it out.

My brother, the Institute director, totally loves the Book of
Mormon. He spends at least half an hour every day reading and
studying it. He goes very deep into the text. So deep that it
took him almost a YEAR to go through the Book of Jacob.

I think a lot of people treat scripture as some sort of
Rorschach test. You take the flowery, but fuzzy language and
impose on it what you wish. With this viewpoint, any book can
be anything you want it to be--including something you can love
deeply. But what you're loving is not what's in the book.
It's what YOU are forcing into the book.

So loving the book of Mormon is a version of loving yourself.

That's why it has to be approached "prayerfully" and "humbly."
You can't just let it speak for itself, but you have to put
yourself in to a "receptive" (read "creative") frame of mind.
You can't approach it on its own terms, you have to approach it
on YOUR own terms. And being told that it is a book of sublime
spiritual truths points your emotions in a certain direction
for finding "sublime spiritual truths" hidden there. If it had
been presented as a book of clever fly-fishing tips, you'd find
those.

I don't question that Holland loves the Book of Mormon. But, to
paraphrase H. L. Mencken, I'll accept Holland's love of the
Book of Mormon in the same light that I'll accept his theory
that his wife is beautiful and that his children are smart.